Wordpress

So I’ve been a bit lax at approving comments lately, but in my defense there were 3500 of them… in fact it turns out that only about 8-9 of them weren’t actually spam! So how did I finally deal with this?

It definitely wasn’t by using the bulk actions on 20 comments at a time. Instead I activated the Akismet plugin which has been hanging around my install for a while, albeit disabled.

Before you can get started you need to grab an API key from their site but its free for personal/non commercial use (double check the terms and conditions on the site though, don’t take my word for it 🙂 )

Now the one thing that it doesn’t do is handle all your old comments automatically, but don’t fret! It can still go back over your old comments and clear out the spam. To do this you just load up your admin page, head over to the Comments tab on the left and at the top you will find a button, “Check for Spam”. If you press this the page will stay the same but the browser loading image will start to move. Word of warning, on my server with over 3500 comments to look through it took about 10-15minutes and that was spent entirely sat on the same page with absolutely no indication it was working. When it had finished I actually got a connection timed out page but once I reloaded I had just a handful of comments to moderate 🙂